And Forward, Ever Forward
by Kudzu1
Summary: On a farflung world, the Clone Wars rage on seven months after the execution of the Separatist Council convened on Mustafar and the formal end to largescale fighting as declared by Emperor Palpatine. Much is different than it once was.


And Forward, Ever Forward  
By Kudzu

"_If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow"  
_Philip Crosby

_From _Records of the Republic Clone Infantry_ as a short story, scribed by retired Senior Clone Marshal Commander Van, CC-452 with data provided by soldiers of the 35th Operations Stormplatoon. Text is historically accurate._

"It's not quite the same, is it?"

"What?"

"I said, 'It's not quite the same'."

"I heard what you said," DS-788 growled. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," said DS-591, "that it's not the same since Order 66."

"No Jedi?"

DS-591 grunted. "Aye," he replied. "No Jedi. Not the same leadership."

DS-788 snorted in response. "I don't know about you, _ner vod_, but I never had one of those traitorous _di'kute_ leading me around. For all their laser swords and magic tricks, they made themselves obvious. The Emperor saw right through them in the end."

"I am not talking about what they really were," DS-591 said, exasperated. "I'm talking about the leadership. It's different."

"Maybe you would know. Me," DS-788 jerked a grey-armored thumb at his chestplate, "I don't notice any difference. I never served under one of those brave, noble _hut'uune_."

"Look at you," DS-591 scoffed. "You speak your tough language and think you're the champion of the galaxy. Captain Unstoppable."

"I am _Mando'a!_" the clone of Jango Fett roared. "Have you already forgotten who we are? Who we were born to be?"

"We are the soldiers of the Republic," DS-591 recited by rote. "Our purpose is to -"

"There is no Republic anymore," DS-788 hissed, "and good riddance. The Empire is strong. We are the soldiers of the Empire. The Old Republic is gone."

DS-591 acknowledged this with an inclination of his helmeted head. "We are Imperial troops, then," he conceded. "We are not Mandalorians."

"We are clones of the Mandalore," the other stormtrooper argued vehemently.

"'The Mandalore' is dead. He died at Geonosis."

"He was killed!" DS-788 blasted back. "He was killed by a Jedi!"

The covert operations trooper said irritably, "He was an enemy combatant!"

"We are his legacy," said DS-788 firmly. "We are _Mando'ade_: the sons of Mandalore."

"My loyalty is to the interests of the Empire," DS-591 disagreed.

"Sure," DS-788 snapped. "You claim fealty to the Empire even as you glorify the Jedi and reminisce about the days that they used us all. You do not deserve to wear your armor."

Quick as a flash, the Imperial soldier seized DS-788 by the throat and lifted him into the air. He thrashed, matte-booted feet dangling helplessly off the ground. "Do not challenge me," DS-591 said, his voice deadly. "Take it back."

"No," the other trooper gurgled defiantly.

"Take it back!"

"What in blazes is going on here?"

DS-591 threw his insulter down to sprawl across the ferrocrete of the abandoned city and turned to see Commissar Straasha, CM-890, striding towards them. Even behind the visor of the squad leader's crowned helmet, his eyes seemed to blaze with the wrath of a god.

"What the hell do you think you're doing, soldier?" Straasha snapped. "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't blow you away where you stand!"

"Seven-Eight-Eight here," DS-591 spat, "seems to be of the opinion that I do not deserve to wear stormtrooper armor."

"Explain yourself," Straasha said coldly, now addressing the soldier picking himself up off the pavement.

"Five-Nine-One was talking about how great the leadership of the Jedi was, Commissar. He was -"

"You lie!" DS-591 shouted, decking DS-788 with a clenched fist. The covert ops clone was again thrown across the sidewalk, helmet turned partially around by the force of the blow.

"Five-Nine-One," Straasha said angrily, "your conduct is unacceptable."

"I didn't extol any Jedi virtues, damn them," said the trooper, breathing heavily. "I said that things are different, sir."

"They are," the commissar agreed icily.

"He insulted _Mando'ade_," DS-788 gasped, turning his helmet around straight. "He insulted his own flesh and blood."

"I tire of this," said Straasha. "Sort out your differences. The next time I see the two of you going at it again, I will have you both disintegrated. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir," the troopers said in unison, saluting.

"Good boys," the stormtrooper leader said. "We're being airlifted out in twelve. Be ready."

* * *

"Load up," said the gunship pilot wearily. "Everybody in. One-way to Erudar, flight _Dreaming Dragon_."

"That's Empire Five-Five-Eight, pilot," the troop leader corrected him gruffly. "The _Dreaming Dragon_ I.D. was erased from file seven months ago."

"It's my ship," the pilot replied. "I'll call it what I want."

A scratchy through-helmet sigh. "Do as you damn well please. Empire Five-Five-Eight. We're moving."

"You infantry," he said. "We're moving when we're ready to go."

"Well, we're frellin' secure back here! What are you waiting for, Senex-Juvex Festival?"

"Copy," he muttered grudgingly. "Hold tight. We're lifting off."

_Frellin' Clone Wars_, the pilot thought bitterly as they flew. _The Emperor says they're over. The Droid Army gets shut down and the Separatist Council is executed. The corporations sign armistices and peace treaties, but we're still out in the Rim fighting these Sithspawn._

"Headhunter, incoming," his co-pilot warned.

"_Fierfek_," he swore pessimistically. "Model?"

"We're one mark only. One of the swing-wings."

"Easy pickings, even for a Larty," he replied, using the fond nickname that the clone troopers had for the LAAT/i attack gunships. "Ding, Count, you ready?"

The turret gunners replied with affirmatives.

Twin laser blasts sizzled crimson from the oncoming snubfighter's wingtip cannons, but the gunship held together even when they scored hits on it. A brief instant later, solid green beams of death lashed out from the bubble turrets on either side of the transport's fuselage, tearing the hapless Z-95 Headhunter apart.

The rest of the flight was uneventful, but the pilot breathed a sigh of relief when they touched down and the troops leapt out of the hold all the same.

* * *

"Covert operations troopers," Commissar Straasha said. "Go."

They surged forward, DC-15s carbines blazing blue plasma into the advancing Separatist fanatics in the narrow alleyway. Red needles pierced the armored chests of two of the Imperial stormtroopers and they fell dead against the grey ferrocrete. The rest pressed on, disregarding their losses, until the last of the thugs was charred flesh and black skeleton. Behind them, black-armored snipers like humanoid beetles crawled up ladder rungs into the gutters of the drab, blocky buildings. Straasha stepped forward.

"Excellent," he said grimly. "Keep going. Stay against the walls and in the shadows, and activate your silencer fields."

"Yes, sir," the covert ops stormtroopers replied, immediately moving against the sides of the deserted buildings and activating their personal sound-cancel field generators. The equipment was costly but effective. With a soldier exercising proper caution, stealth, and camouflage and using the environment to his advantage, he could be virtually undetectable to the organic eye. They were reserved for the sneakiest of the sneaks: the Imperial covert operations forces.

They advanced, Straasha pressed against the wall along with them. The snipers crawled through the murky gutters above, swinging noiselessly down to drop into position behind them as the alley bent down to a tunnel that ended in a sewer grate.

The commissar made a signal meaning, "Who goes?" One of the troopers nodded and stepped forward, and the others pulled back to give him about three square meters' worth of room. The Imperial pulled off a thermal detonator, primed it, and got up close to the sewer grate. After five seconds, it went off, immediately killing the clone and blowing open the grate. The silence field cancelled out the majority of the noise, muffling the sound of the explosion helpfully.

Self-sacrifice: in the Grand Army of the Republic, such an action would have been anathema. Committing suicide for a trivial objective when there were better alternatives was frowned upon. Each trooper was an important asset. Even in the Imperial stormtrooper corps, soldiers were instructed not to throw their lives away. However, among the covert operations forces, sneakiest of the sneaks, no holds were barred when it came to completing their objectives as effectively as possible. If that meant that soldiers had to routinely explode themselves to move past obstacles as efficiently - a function of speed and silence in this line of work - as possible, so be it.

Stormtroopers were utterly fearless and totally dedicated.

The troopers carefully dropped down into the green sewage filth, not even complaining behind their walls of soundlessness at the stench and the disgusting consistency of the stuff. Its viscosity was somewhere between oily nut spread and liquefied duracrete, and the smell was…well, the smell was simply indescribable. All in all, just part of the job.

The clones crept through the muck noiselessly, ignoring the skittering vermin, malfunctioning and rusty old droids, and graffiti that suggested that before the city's neutron bombing by a squadron of Imperial V-19 Torrents, teenage gangs used to visit these repulsive sewers routinely to make their mark, declaring their territory even beneath the ferrocrete roads of Erudar. It was somewhat ironic. When it came to _real_ wars, their "territory" was utterly meaningless.

Commissar Straasha had once been assigned the numerical designation of CT-106/7855. He had served under Marshal Commander Keller. On one of his missions during the days of the Old Republic - he couldn't recall which of the countless ones it had been on - he'd asked Keller about gang wars in relation to peace and real wars such as the one they had been fighting; the war that they were _still_ fighting.

Keller had said that gangs weren't usually recognized by true governments. Straasha now saw that it was small wonder that this was so. No world's worth of gangs could have prevented the Empire from bombarding it with radiation sufficient enough to kill anything unlucky enough to lack the stubborn resilience of the dumb pests still scurrying amid contaminated Human and alien wastes. The Empire was still fighting a real war. These gang wars had been childish, and now the children had stopped playing.

Armis II was over. The last chapter in it was the Separatist holdouts who had fled down to it after the radiation had dissolved, as it did with neutron bombings after several days. That chapter was about to be concluded, and the book of Armis II would be closed forever. With any luck, this wouldn't be a dead end and the information from the rebels here would lead them to the next cell of remaining Confederacy radicals.

At last they reached the ladder up to the grate that emptied out near the supermall taken as Confederacy headquarters on this lifeless world. Again, a soldier sacrificed himself to blow the grate out, and the team of grey-armored men climbed out of Erudar's bowels.

The snipers again took their positions, and the troopers immediately took to the walls and the shadows. Still, though, a mob of rebel soldiers poured from the doors of the mall, blasters firing. Snaps of crimson cracked out from sniping rifles mounted against the edges of the gutters, bringing them down one by one, and the blue bolts of stormtrooper guns tore holes through their abdomens and collapsed them screaming.

It was the vengeance of the Empire, the loud cry of guns fired for long enough. The protestations of weapons and men who had seen their share of action already, and the death knell of a war that should have ended seven months ago.

"Cov-ops," Straasha cried, deactivating his own silence field and motioning for his men to do the same, "the objective lies before us. The enemy is all but vanquished! Onwards," and he knew not where he drew the words from, words that would one day shine in the annals of military datafiles, but they came, "always onwards, my men. Stride onto the ruin of our foes, and forward, ever forward…"


End file.
